I've haven't read it recently but I enjoyed it when I did.
Quote:
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"My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. ...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."
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Orwell — Collected Essays
I think the novel is most effective in portraying the media as a slave to a totalitarian regime and the way this affects even the language of the people through newspeak. One only needs to watch Fox News and their ilk to see how "newspeak" has become rather commonplace.
However I feel Orwell is strongest in his quasi-journalistic novels especially
Down and Out in London and Paris and
The Road to Wigan Pier. His fictional characters are not as engaging as the real people he describes.